Media item recommendation systems in the context of a social network are known. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0016205 A1, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses a recommendation system wherein media item recommendations are automatically generated and sent between devices that are coupled together by virtue of a “friend” status between users of the devices. Each device has an associated recommendation queue that contains media item recommendations. Each device receives media item recommendations from certain devices, and may send recommendations to certain devices. Upon receipt of a media item recommendation, a device prioritizes the media item recommendation according to a plurality of user preferences, or priority indicators, that determine an order in the recommendation queue of the new media item recommendation with respect to the media item recommendations that were already in the recommendation queue. The priority indicators, for example, may be based on metadata associated with a media item, such as a genre of the media item, an artist name associated with the media item, a decade during which the media item was recorded, and the like.
As each device plays a media item, a media item recommendation for the media item is automatically generated by the device and sent to other devices to which the device is coupled. Since a device generates and sends media item recommendations based on the order that media item recommendations are prioritized in the respective recommendation queue, a first user may find it useful to preview a second user's recommendation queue prior to designating the second user a friend in an attempt to discern the type of media item recommendations the first user may expect to receive from the second user. Thus, there is a need for an ability to view a user's recommendation queue prior to designating the user as a friend.
However, because a recommendation queue will change after a media item recommendation is inserted in the recommendation queue, or when the second user alters a weighting of the priority indicators, a snap-shot of a recommendation queue at an instant in time, while helpful, may not provide sufficient information to the first user. Since the second user's recommendation queue is in part based on the media item recommendations generated by those devices to which the second user is coupled, there is a need to determine commonality information as a function of the priority indicators of the second user, and the priority indicators of the devices that provide media item recommendations to the second user. Such commonality information would be useful to the first user in further ascertaining the types of media item recommendations that may be provided to the first user, should the first user designate the second user a friend.